Fake Celebrity Porn Has Become A Thing Thanks To AI And Reddit

By Dami Olonisakin

26 Jan 2018, 18:54

Thanks to a Reddit user named "deepfakes", it seems as though AI porn could be the new big thing in the porn industry. It’s an odd, and some might call creepy, method of swapping the faces of celebrities onto the faces of porn stars to create new pornographic content.

This was first reported last year in December, but there's now another, more simple software called “Fakeapp” that does something similar. This software is one that an average person can use, unlike the original app where the user needed a bit of a technical background to use it.

Since the story got picked up, the original NSFW thread on Reddit has had over 15,000 subscribers with several sub-threads.

Deepfakesapp, the creator of Fakeapp, explained to Motherboard that the goal was to help build a system that was far less complex than the original so everyone can use it. He hopes to streamline it even further in the next couple of days or weeks.

“Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button,” said the redditor to Motherboard.

Some may say the inspiration was taken from the big screens over in Hollywood – notorious for creating all sorts of imagery tricks – but exactly how far will this continue to go if regular people have access to AI apps that can forge video content?

Contributors from another Reddit thread argue that soon even photo evidence may no longer be a method of proof. Perhaps in the next 20 years, they add, video footage will no longer be seen as hard evidence.

The quality of the face-swap depends on how good the program has been set up – some are obviously not the celebrities themselves, while others are disturbingly well done. An example of this is Princess Leia in the film Rogue One. If you look at the bottom of the split screen, you’ll see the FakeApp version that was made in just under 30 minutes. Pretty convincing right?